Part 11

Peter the Great was frightened, when an infant, by falling from a bridge into the water. Long afterward, when he had reached manhood, this hardy and resolute man was so affected by the sound of wheels rattling over a bridge that he had to discipline himself by listening to the sound, in spite of his dread of it, in order to overcome his antipathy. The story told by Abbe Boileau of Pascal is very similar to that related of Peter. As he was driving in his coach and four over the bridge at Neuilly, his horses took fright and ran away, and the leaders broke from their harness and sprang into the river, leaving the wheel-horses and the carriage on the bridge. Ever after this fright it is said that Pascal had the terrifying sense that he was just on the edge of an abyss, ready to fall over.

What strange early impression was it which led a certain lady always to shriek aloud if she ventured to enter a church, as it is recorded? The old and simple way of accounting for it would be the scriptural one, that it was an unclean spirit who dwelt in her, and who, when she entered the holy place and brought her spiritual tenant into the presence of the sacred symbols, “cried with a loud voice, and came out of” her. A very singular case, the doctor himself had recorded, and which the reader may accept as authentic, is the following: At the head of the doctor's front stairs stood, and still stands, a tall clock, of early date and stately presence. A middle-aged visitor, noticing it as he entered the front door, remarked that he should feel a great unwillingness to pass that clock. He could not go near one of those tall timepieces without a profound agitation, which he dreaded to undergo. This very singular idiosyncrasy he attributed to a fright when he was an infant in the arms of his nurse.

She was standing near one of those tall clocks, when the cord which supported one of its heavy leaden weights broke, and the weight came crashing down to the bottom of the case. Some effect must have been produced upon the pulpy nerve centres from which they never recovered. Why should not this happen, when we know that a sudden mental shock may be the cause of insanity? The doctor remembered the verse of “The Ancient Mariner:”

“I moved my lips; the pilot shrieked And fell down in a fit; The holy hermit raised his eyes And prayed where he did sit. I took the oars; the pilot's boy, Who now doth crazy go, Laughed loud and long, and all the while His eyes went to and fro.”

This is only poetry, it is true, but the poet borrowed the description from nature, and the records of our asylums could furnish many cases where insanity was caused by a sudden fright.

More than this, hardly a year passes that we do not read of some person, a child commonly, killed outright by terror,--scared to death, literally. Sad cases they often are, in which, nothing but a surprise being intended, the shock has instantly arrested the movements on which life depends. If a mere instantaneous impression can produce effects like these, such an impression might of course be followed by consequences less fatal or formidable, but yet serious in their nature. If here and there a person is killed, as if by lightning, by a sudden startling sight or sound, there must be more numerous cases in which a terrible shock is produced by similar apparently insignificant causes,--a shock which falls short of overthrowing the reason and does not destroy life, yet leaves a lasting effect upon the subject of it.

This point, then, was settled in the mind of Dr. Butts, namely, that, as a violent emotion caused by a sudden shock can kill or craze a human being, there is no perversion of the faculties, no prejudice, no change of taste or temper, no eccentricity, no antipathy, which such a cause may not rationally account for. He would not be surprised, he said to himself, to find that some early alarm, like that which was experienced by Peter the Great or that which happened to Pascal, had broken some spring in this young man's nature, or so changed its mode of action as to account for the exceptional remoteness of his way of life. But how could any conceivable antipathy be so comprehensive as to keep a young man aloof from all the world, and make a hermit of him? He did not hate the human race; that was clear enough. He treated Paolo with great kindness, and the Italian was evidently much attached to him. He had talked naturally and pleasantly with the young man he had helped out of his dangerous situation when his boat was upset. Dr. Butts heard that he had once made a short visit to this young man, at his rooms in the University. It was not misanthropy, therefore, which kept him solitary. What could be broad enough to cover the facts of the case? Nothing that the doctor could think of, unless it were some color, the sight of which acted on him as it did on the individual before mentioned, who could not look at anything red without fainting. Suppose this were a case of the same antipathy. How very careful it would make the subject of it as to where he went and with whom he consorted! Time and patience would be pretty sure to bring out new developments, and physicians, of all men in the world, know how to wait as well as how to labor.

Such were some of the crude facts as Dr. Butts found them in books or gathered them from his own experience. He soon discovered that the story had got about the village that Maurice Kirkwood was the victim of an “antipathy,” whatever that word might mean in the vocabulary of the people of the place. If he suspected the channel through which it had reached the little community, and, spreading from that centre, the country round, he did not see fit to make out of his suspicions a domestic casus belli. Paolo might have mentioned it to others as well as to himself. Maurice might have told some friend, who had divulged it. But to accuse Mrs. Butts, good Mrs. Butts, of petit treason in telling one of her husband's professional secrets was too serious a matter to be thought of. He would be a little more careful, he promised himself, the next time, at any rate; for he had to concede, in spite of every wish to be charitable in his judgment, that it was among the possibilities that the worthy lady had forgotten the rule that a doctor's patients must put their tongues out, and a doctor's wife must keep her tongue in.

VIII. THE PANSOPHIAN SOCIETY.

The Secretary of this association was getting somewhat tired of the office, and the office was getting somewhat tired of him. It occurred to the members of the Society that a little fresh blood infused into it might stir up the general vitality of the organization. The woman suffragists saw no reason why the place of Secretary need as a matter of course be filled by a person of the male sex. They agitated, they made domiciliary visits, they wrote notes to influential citizens, and finally announced as their candidate the young lady who had won and worn the school name of “The Terror,” who was elected. She was just the person for the place: wide awake, with all her wits about her, full of every kind of knowledge, and, above all, strong on points of order and details of management, so that she could prompt the presiding officer, to do which is often the most essential duty of a Secretary. The President, the worthy rector, was good at plain sailing in the track of the common moralities and proprieties, but was liable to get muddled if anything came up requiring swift decision and off-hand speech. The Terror had schooled herself in the debating societies of the Institute, and would set up the President, when he was floored by an awkward question, as easily as if he were a ninepin which had been bowled over.

It has been already mentioned that the Pansophian Society received communications from time to time from writers outside of its own organization. Of late these had been becoming more frequent. Many of them were sent in anonymously, and as there were numerous visitors to the village, and two institutions not far removed from it, both full of ambitious and intelligent young persons, it was often impossible to trace the papers to their authors. The new Secretary was alive with curiosity, and as sagacious a little body as one might find if in want of a detective. She could make a pretty shrewd guess whether a paper was written by a young or old person, by one of her own sex or the other, by an experienced hand or a novice.

Among the anonymous papers she received was one which exercised her curiosity to an extraordinary degree. She felt a strong suspicion that “the Sachem,” as the boat-crews used to call him, “the Recluse,” “the Night-Hawk,” “the Sphinx,” as others named him, must be the author of it. It appeared to her the production of a young person of a reflective, poetical turn of mind. It was not a woman's way of writing; at least, so thought the Secretary. The writer had travelled much; had resided in Italy, among other places. But so had many of the summer visitors and residents of Arrowhead Village. The handwriting was not decisive; it had some points of resemblance with the pencilled orders for books which Maurice sent to the Library, but there were certain differences, intentional or accidental, which weakened this evidence. There was an undertone in the essay which was in keeping with the mode of life of the solitary stranger. It might be disappointment, melancholy, or only the dreamy sadness of a young person who sees the future he is to climb, not as a smooth ascent, but as overhanging him like a cliff, ready to crush him, with all his hopes and prospects. This interpretation may have been too imaginative, but here is the paper, and the reader can form his own opinion:

MY THREE COMPANIONS.

“I have been from my youth upwards a wanderer. I do not mean constantly flitting from one place to another, for my residence has often been fixed for considerable periods. From time to time I have put down in a notebook the impressions made upon me by the scenes through which I have passed. I have long hesitated whether to let any of my notes appear before the public. My fear has been that they were too subjective, to use the metaphysician's term,--that I have seen myself reflected in Nature, and not the true aspects of Nature as she was meant to be understood. One who should visit the Harz Mountains would see--might see, rather his own colossal image shape itself on the morning mist. But if in every mist that rises from the meadows, in every cloud that hangs upon the mountain, he always finds his own reflection, we cannot accept him as an interpreter of the landscape.

“There must be many persons present at the meetings of the Society to which this paper is offered who have had experiences like that of its author. They have visited the same localities, they have had many of the same thoughts and feelings. Many, I have no doubt. Not all,--no, not all. Others have sought the companionship of Nature; I have been driven to it. Much of my life has been passed in that communion. These pages record some of the intimacies I have formed with her under some of her various manifestations.

“I have lived on the shore of the great ocean, where its waves broke wildest and its voice rose loudest.

“I have passed whole seasons on the banks of mighty and famous rivers.

“I have dwelt on the margin of a tranquil lake, and floated through many a long, long summer day on its clear waters.

“I have learned the 'various language' of Nature, of which poetry has spoken,--at least, I have learned some words and phrases of it. I will translate some of these as I best may into common speech.

“The OCEAN says to the dweller on its shores:--

“You are neither welcome nor unwelcome. I do not trouble myself with the living tribes that come down to my waters. I have my own people, of an older race than yours, that grow to mightier dimensions than your mastodons and elephants; more numerous than all the swarms that fill the air or move over the thin crust of the earth. Who are you that build your palaces on my margin? I see your white faces as I saw the dark faces of the tribes that came before you, as I shall look upon the unknown family of mankind that will come after you. And what is your whole human family but a parenthesis in a single page of my history? The raindrops stereotyped themselves on my beaches before a living creature left his footprints there. This horseshoe-crab I fling at your feet is of older lineage than your Adam,--perhaps, indeed, you count your Adam as one of his descendants. What feeling have I for you? Not scorn, not hatred,--not love,--not loathing. No!---indifference,--blank indifference to you and your affairs that is my feeling, say rather absence of feeling, as regards you.---Oh yes, I will lap your feet, I will cool you in the hot summer days, I will bear you up in my strong arms, I will rock you on my rolling undulations, like a babe in his cradle. Am I not gentle? Am I not kind? Am I not harmless? But hark! The wind is rising, and the wind and I are rough playmates! What do you say to my voice now? Do you see my foaming lips? Do you feel the rocks tremble as my huge billows crash against them? Is not my anger terrible as I dash your argosy, your thunder-bearing frigate, into fragments, as you would crack an eggshell?--No, not anger; deaf, blind, unheeding indifference,--that is all. Out of me all things arose; sooner or later, into me all things subside. All changes around me; I change not. I look not at you, vain man, and your frail transitory concerns, save in momentary glimpses: I look on the white face of my dead mistress, whom I follow as the bridegroom follows the bier of her who has changed her nuptial raiment for the shroud.

“Ye whose thoughts are of eternity, come dwell at my side. Continents and islands grow old, and waste and disappear. The hardest rock crumbles; vegetable and animal kingdoms come into being, wax great, decline, and perish, to give way to others, even as human dynasties and nations and races come and go. Look on me! 'Time writes no wrinkle' on my forehead. Listen to me! All tongues are spoken on my shores, but I have only one language: the winds taught me their vowels the crags and the sands schooled me in my rough or smooth consonants. Few words are mine but I have whispered them and sung them and shouted them to men of all tribes from the time when the first wild wanderer strayed into my awful presence. Have you a grief that gnaws at your heart-strings? Come with it to my shore, as of old the priest of far-darting Apollo carried his rage and anguish to the margin of the loud-roaring sea. There, if anywhere you will forget your private and short-lived woe, for my voice speaks to the infinite and the eternal in your consciousness.

“To him who loves the pages of human history, who listens to the voices of the world about him, who frequents the market and the thoroughfare, who lives in the study of time and its accidents rather than in the deeper emotions, in abstract speculation and spiritual contemplation, the RIVER addresses itself as his natural companion.

“Come live with me. I am active, cheerful, communicative, a natural talker and story-teller. I am not noisy, like the ocean, except occasionally when I am rudely interrupted, or when I stumble and get a fall. When I am silent you can still have pleasure in watching my changing features. My idlest babble, when I am toying with the trifles that fall in my way, if not very full of meaning, is at least musical. I am not a dangerous friend, like the ocean; no highway is absolutely safe, but my nature is harmless, and the storms that strew the beaches with wrecks cast no ruins upon my flowery borders. Abide with me, and you shall not die of thirst, like the forlorn wretches left to the mercies of the pitiless salt waves. Trust yourself to me, and I will carry you far on your journey, if we are travelling to the same point of the compass. If I sometimes run riot and overflow your meadows, I leave fertility behind me when I withdraw to my natural channel. Walk by my side toward the place of my destination. I will keep pace with you, and you shall feel my presence with you as that of a self-conscious being like yourself. You will find it hard to be miserable in my company; I drain you of ill-conditioned thoughts as I carry away the refuse of your dwelling and its grounds.”

But to him whom the ocean chills and crushes with its sullen indifference, and the river disturbs with its never-pausing and never-ending story, the silent LAKE shall be a refuge and a place of rest for his soul.

“'Vex not yourself with thoughts too vast for your limited faculties,' it says; 'yield not yourself to the babble of the running stream. Leave the ocean, which cares nothing for you or any living thing that walks the solid earth; leave the river, too busy with its own errand, too talkative about its own affairs, and find peace with me, whose smile will cheer you, whose whisper will soothe you. Come to me when the morning sun blazes across my bosom like a golden baldric; come to me in the still midnight, when I hold the inverted firmament like a cup brimming with jewels, nor spill one star of all the constellations that float in my ebon goblet. Do you know the charm of melancholy? Where will you find a sympathy like mine in your hours of sadness? Does the ocean share your grief? Does the river listen to your sighs? The salt wave, that called to you from under last month's full moon, to-day is dashing on the rocks of Labrador; the stream, that ran by you pure and sparkling, has swallowed the poisonous refuse of a great city, and is creeping to its grave in the wide cemetery that buries all things in its tomb of liquid crystal. It is true that my waters exhale and are renewed from one season to another; but are your features the same, absolutely the same, from year to year? We both change, but we know each other through all changes. Am I not mirrored in those eyes of yours? And does not Nature plant me as an eye to behold her beauties while she is dressed in the glories of leaf and flower, and draw the icy lid over my shining surface when she stands naked and ashamed in the poverty of winter?'

“I have had strange experiences and sad thoughts in the course of a life not very long, but with a record which much longer lives could not match in incident. Oftentimes the temptation has come over me with dangerous urgency to try a change of existence, if such change is a part of human destiny,--to seek rest, if that is what we gain by laying down the burden of life. I have asked who would be the friend to whom I should appeal for the last service I should have need of. Ocean was there, all ready, asking no questions, answering none. What strange voyages, downward through its glaucous depths, upwards to its boiling and frothing surface, wafted by tides, driven by tempests, disparted by rude agencies; one remnant whitening on the sands of a northern beach, one perhaps built into the circle of a coral reef in the Pacific, one settling to the floor of the vast laboratory where continents are built, to emerge in far-off ages! What strange companions for my pall-bearers! Unwieldy sea-monsters, the stories of which are counted fables by the spectacled collectors who think their catalogues have exhausted nature; naked-eyed creatures, staring, glaring, nightmare-like spectres of the ghastly-green abysses; pulpy islands, with life in gelatinous immensity,--what a company of hungry heirs at every ocean funeral! No! No! Ocean claims great multitudes, but does not invite the solitary who would fain be rid of himself.

“Shall I seek a deeper slumber at the bottom of the lake I love than I have ever found when drifting idly over its surface? No, again. I do not want the sweet, clear waters to know me in the disgrace of nature, when life, the faithful body-servant, has ceased caring for me. That must not be. The mirror which has pictured me so often shall never know me as an unwelcome object.